Sturgeonblogging: E. Lily Yu's "The Urashima Effect" and closing comments

We join a man, Leo Aoki, as he awakens from hibernation three subjective years, halfway, into a journey at relativistic speeds to a planet in another solar system. He is, according to plans at any rate, part of a research mission — the first of several people, including Leo's astrophysicist wife Esther, who will also be making the same journey, though the others will be two years behind. The story alternates between Leo's sort of puttering around his small vessel (playing chess and go and other games against the computer; looking out the ports at the stars, "gathered by aberration into a glittering disc eight degrees across" in an otherwise entirely black "sky"; and so forth) and his listening to a recording Esther made for him, most of the portion we hear consisting of her rendition of the folk tale of Urashima Taro, the fisherman who journeys to the bottom of the sea for what he thinks are only a few years but finds when he returns to land that centuries have passed*; she (a third generation Japanese-American) knows the story where he (fifth generation) does not because she is "inquisitive and knowledgeable about the cultural inheritance he had never claimed."

*The story may be familiar to sf readers from Ursula K. Le Guin's use of it in "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", there as here a metaphor, naturally, for time dilation.

Leo thinks at first that the recording is a standard part of the mission, part of the "sixty hours of audio recordings by family and friends" each member of the team must bring with them, "to keep them sane and functional in their isolation." Once she finishes the story of Urashima, though, Esther tells Leo that shortly after he was put into hibernation "the US and Japan came to the brink of war"; there is talk in the US of bringing back internment camps. Because of these events, the flight that would have brought her to the planet — a collaborative US/Japan effort — has been scrapped, in favor of a "unilateral program that will not have the funding" to send her. Leo, over Esther's protests, has been sent anyway. Esther says that she "broke into your ship's systems and altered these recordings so that you would know what happened" — telling him the story of Urashima Taro first in order to give him time to recover from hibernation, and to prepare him for the news — and that she has rigged his ship so that, should he decide to, he can eject and, decades later, return to Earth to see Esther again, even though she will have aged enormously, become a different person in the intervening time. At story's end, it seems Leo has decided to continue the mission — for if he were to turn around, all that has already been lost would still be lost, and he would additionally be losing everything that, in terms of the mission, has been gained.

Now that I've dithered for two paragraphs in plot summary, I have to confess: I have basically nothing to say about this story. In theory I approve of its stasis, and of its talkiness. It is clear that Yu has thoughts in her head that I like, thoughts about loss and loneliness, time and distance, the melancholy beauty of Relativity, the need for roots, the shifting course of a life; and I'm sure I would nod in agreement to most anything she might say about the overwhelming racism of the United States. But one does not read stories in order to agree or disagree with them (or rather, this is but one part of reading among many), and however many marks I may make on my scorecard while reading this story the fact remains that the story itself is, for me, mostly uninspiring (which is to say, it inspires in me no strong feeling, whether positive or negative). It goes from point A to point B (with perfectly skillful zig-zagging and detours to points C and D along the way), but it gives me no feeling that anything has happened — in me, in the writer, in the world, even in those abstract concepts we call "characters". I'm not talking about plot or lack thereof, I'm not talking about "dynamic characters," I'm not talking about the busy-ness that many people are referring to when they say that things "happen" in a work of fiction; I mean that the work of art "The Urashima Effect" does not feel to me like an event of any consequence. It's fine. It's good enough, as far as that goes. I'm not sorry I read it, but neither am I happy I did. I spent most of my last post defending a story against the RUMIR title (for those just joining us: "routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable" — from Joanna Russ), but this time it seems to me that the acronym fits extremely well, so long as one doesn't forget the MIR along with the RU.

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Since I do find myself with so little to say about the story, and since this is the final chapter of Sturgeonblogging, I may as well use this space for a wrap-up. I had originally planned to write a summation post with thoughts on the award in general, lists of the stories I would hate to win and those I wouldn't mind if they did, and maybe predictions. But the cat's out of the bag; I had been under the impression that the winner would be announced this coming weekend, but it actually happened on Tuesday (which means this post would have been something of an anticlimax even if I had had anything useful to say about the story at hand). But just for the hell of it, why don't I say something like what I would have said if it hadn't happened yet.

First, links to my posts.

1. Gregory Norman Bossert's "Bloom"
2. Vylar Kaftan's "The Weight of the Sunrise"
3. Alaya Dawn Johnson's "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass"
4. Will McIntosh's "Over There"
5. Alan DeNiro's "The Wildfires of Antarctica"
6. Val Nolan's "The Irish Astronaut"
7. Sarah Pinsker's "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind"
8. Robert Reed's "Mystic Falls"
9. Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer"
10. E. Lily Yu's "The Urashima Effect" (duh, scroll back up)

Ten stories. Five I wouldn't have minded winning ("Bloom", "They Shall", "Mystic Falls", "Selected Program Notes", and, perhaps surprisingly given the negativity of my review, "Wildfires" — which at least is trying for something). Five whose winning would have bothered me (and one whose winning did), to varying degrees (had "Urashima" won, I would have said "Really? Why? OK then," and shrugged; had "Over There" won, I would have known the jury was trolling us). If I were picking a winner from this list? I'm not sure. Probably "Selected Program Notes", though "Mystic Falls" and "They Shall" would be close contenders. (I'm also sure that if there is a best science fiction story of last year, whatever it is it wasn't on the shortlist at all.)

Looking over the list, I'm impressed in some ways with the variety. "Bloom", "Weight", "Over There", " Wildfires", and "Irish", say, ignoring for the moment their varying virtues, all go about being (or, in the last case, not being) sf in very different ways. In a contemporary field that can often feel claustrophobically homogeneous, it's nice to see that at least some kind of difference is being rewarded here. On the other hand, though, three notable formal departures aside, there is a great deal of homogeneity in how the stories go about being stories. You might be able to slip a piece of paper into the stylistic space between "Bloom", "Weight", "Irish", "They Shall", "In Joy", "Mystic Falls", and "Urashima", but it would have to be that really thin paper they print the unabridged OED on; and even "Over There", for all its two-column technique, is fully, if incompetently, committed to the same kind of storytelling.

I've been debating with myself whether to get sassy about the jury (and if so just how sassy to get). I have no particular opinion of Noël Sturgeon (who I know nothing about), James Gunn (I think all I've read of him is his terribly pointless but mildly charming book about Isaac Asimov), or Kij Johnson (I loved "Spar" when I read it a few years ago but suspect I might not now, and that's all I know of her). But everything I know about Elizabeth Bear and Andy Duncan leads me to believe that they are precisely the kind of artistically bland, timid, and contented people that I think are the bane of sf's contemporary existence (whether as writers, readers, critics, or editors), not to mention their equally bland, timid, and contented brand of liberalism and lily-white "anti-racism".

Given this, and given the general tenor of the choices, I have a strong suspicion that even those stories on the shortlist that I liked were chosen for reasons I would find unacceptable. Where I liked "Bloom" despite its "human story" (as I put it in my review), I suspect that that human story is precisely why it is on the shortlist, that if the story had committed to what I found lively in it it would not have been nominated at all. (Actually, it might never have been published at all, but though it's related, that's a different question.) Where I found the luminously poetic moments of "They Shall" questionable, I suspect they might be all the jury noticed. And so on.

If I had gotten this in before the announcement of the winner, I would have predicted that "Weight" would win, precisely because its inability to commit to its own conceit and its white-liberal-anchored "understanding" of other races and cultures are both so much in alignment with what I know of Bear and Duncan, and seem to epitomise the criteria I think I see driving the choices. As it turns out the winner was "In Joy", which would have been my second guess. In a way it's a relief; I really do find "Weight" not just bad but reprehensible, and for it to win a second award (after the Nebula; it's also currently up for the Sidewise, which singlehandedly makes a farce of that award) would have been unbearable. Despite that dodged bullet, though, it's hard to keep the despair at bay. It would almost be better if the jury had selected "Over There" — I could at least write the whole thing off as a farce and have a good laugh. As it is, though, this further recognition of an immaculately skillful story that is very deliberately miles and miles away from where I wish the field would let itself stray verges on heartbreaking.

On the other hand, no one actually seems to care much about the Sturgeons...?

Anyway. Sturgeonblogging is over, thank god. Actually, though I've been known to tease, and though it has been at times very exhausting and dispiriting, the project has also been fun and, for lack of a better word, useful; on balance I'm glad Niall Harrison convinced me to do it, though don't tell him I said so. From exploring what I think is good in stories like "Bloom" and "They Shall" to allowing "Mystic Falls" to lead me to a discussion of some very fundamental points of sfnal poetics; from teasing out the multiplicitous badnesses of "Weight" to stomping gleefully on the ashes of "Over There"; even throwing my hands up in despair at "Irish" and "In Joy": it's all helped me to articulate much of what I need to articulate, or at least to point in that direction. And though I know it's a skewed one, I feel like I have a better picture now of where contemporary short sf is at than I did before I started.

Never again, though. Sorry. Unless I somehow manage to forget how grueling this was, there's no way in hell I'm doing it again next year. On the other hand, the good parts have been good enough that I'm thinking I need to start reviewing new short sf more often. Maybe as some kind of irregular series, once a month or so, I could pick a story from a different venue and write a thing about it. Even with the extremely desultory nature of my new short sf reading I've read four stories so far this year that I think would make fine additions to any award shortlist or year's best collection (if you're wondering, they are Margaret Ronald's "The Innocence of a Place" in Strange Horizons, Dominica Phetteplace's "Through Portal" and Robert Reed's "The Principles" in Asimov's, and Sofia Samatar's "Ogres of East Africa" in Long Hidden), and if I can shine my lustrous spotlight on stories such as these for the benefit of my score [sic] of irregular [sic] readers, or try to explain why less admirable stories are less admirable, then I'd like to do so.

Sturgeonblogging: Kenneth Schneyer's "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer"

The story presents itself as exactly what the title says: a major artist, dead at least thirteen years (probably more, but probably not all that much more), is having a career-spanning exhibition, and these are some of the notes from the accompanying program. Through these notes we learn the broad outlines of her life, seen, necessarily, from the outside and in retrospect, and of her art, seen from the same perspective. She was born in the late 1950s and died in 2025; she painted (seemingly her only medium, or at least the only one mentioned here) in a microscopically hyperrealist style that nevertheless left room for what might broadly be called the nonrepresentationally metaphorical, particularly in the shape of the brushwork; she was a lesbian; her life, as most lives do, contained both happiness and a great deal of pain. She also, though the possibility does not seem to occur to the writer of the notes, may have been able to see (or perhaps was unable not to see) the souls of the dead.

I should say in the interest of full disclosure that I have a fondness for this story independent of its virtues as a story. I first encountered it, or at least the first half of it, read aloud in Schneyer's own impressively theatrical voice, during an evening which also included a great deal both of excellent food and of people telling me how smart and interesting I am. Given these associations it is difficult for me to bring to this story anything even approximating that mythical beast, objectivity; and it is very likely that I come to it with a much greater willingness to be impressed than I typically would.

That said, I was surprised to see Martin Petto, in discussing the Nebula shortlist (on which this story also appears), assign "Selected Program Notes" to the category of "RUMIR* [stories] that awards should weed out but instead tend to elevate." He is absolutely correct about this tendency (and this year's Nebula slate in general was a prime example, as is the case most every year), but I cannot agree with his assessment of this particular story. After RUMIRing it, he describes it as "a slipstream story told through... a frame that exists solely to conceal the fact [that it] doesn’t get any further than feeling very slightly strange." Leaving aside that I don't think I ever understood what "slipstream" was meant to mean (did anyone?), and leaving aside also that I agree, as description if not as evaluation, that the story does not "get any further than feeling very slightly strange" (I don't think it wants to), I think Petto has wholly misjudged the role of the frame.

*A very useful acronym from Joanna Russ: "routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable".

Before I explore the question "what is the frame doing?" directly, I'd like to address the science-fictionality of the story. It has chosen for itself the fairly uncommon, but far from unheard of, strategy of beginning in the recent past and progressing to the near future. But while its use of the conceptual construct of "the future" makes it by some lights ipso facto sf, there is very little in these future sections that we normally associate with sf: no significant technological change is mentioned, the way life is lived goes on largely as it does today*, and so forth. Given that the story is already "speculative" — enough so for today's sf publications, at any rate — by virtue of Latimer's possible relationship with the dead, and given that the technically sfnal element adds very little in the way of the actually sfnal — why does the story bother to extend into the future?

*Latimer is able to marry her partner in Rhode Island, but when Schneyer was writing that by now already-accomplished legal change was so obviously imminent — I would imagine that many same sex couples were already reserving facilities for their ceremonies — that including it is hardly speculative.

The mere fact of publication in a venue specializing in sf cues the reader to look for ways in which the story at hand "is" sf. With this story in particular, the reader quickly realizes that though the earliest "events" (i.e., dates of paintings) are in the past — 1978, 1984... — things are going to continue through to the future; the first clear sign of this is the date of death, 2023, given for Latimer's wife on her first mention in the third note. Seizing on this, the reader begins to look for ways in which these past events might influence future ones, and, once the future arrives, to look for the ways in which the future is different from the past because of that past. These, at least, are the traditionally sfnal elements I would imagine most seasoned sf readers would look for on a first reading.

They will find none. And while looking for the the hints of science fiction the reader has been cued to look for, the more fantastical elements can easily slip by on a first reading (I know I at least did not notice them at all until I re-read). This sort of sleight of hand could easily be dismissed as empty trickery, but for me it is a way structurally to enforce a first reading experience that approximates the "in-world" feeling a reader (or indeed the writer) of the actual notes might have. These people, living in a real world into which the paranormal does not, for them, routinely impinge, would be, as we just were, looking for entirely other information in these notes than clues that Latimer has some sort of communion with the dead.

And after all there is no way to know if she "really" does — we could just as easily ascribe it, as the writer of the notes does, to her combination of attention to detail (from which it is easy to assume that her accurate depictions of people long dead is a result of scrupulous research) and "such obvious imagination" (from which we could interpret, for example, her saying "You have to paint what you see, not what you think you're supposed to see" metaphorically and routinely). And here we begin to see some of what the frame is doing: we, as readers, are not inside Latimer's head, and as such we can never know what she knew, what she saw, what she felt; placing layer upon layer of mediation* and indirection (and indeed misdirection) between her experience and our own is one way to attempt to be true to this unknowingness.

*Another layer, which I won't have occasion in this essay to delve into deeply, is that since these are "selected" program notes, there is presumably, somewhere, a selector — and who is to say why this person has selected what they have selected, that they have not singled out notes that provide an even more distorted portrait?

This method of "representing" Latimer, too, makes for an interesting comparison with her own representational methods. Where her painting is hyperrealist — several times the notes suggest looking at details through a magnifying glass — the story sketches in her life with broad gestures. As such it is almost as if the story of Latimer were, much as one of the paintings discussed does (though along a different axis), criticizing her own artistic methods — as if to say, on the one hand, that there is no need for such detail, and on the other, that it is irresponsible to presume to be able to give so much detail about one's subject.

But there is another sense in which Latimer's enterprise and Schneyer's here are much alike. Repeatedly the notes point out that Latimer's composition and brushstrokes tend to push the viewer's gaze away from the putative subject of the painting, or from subject to subject. "It is as if the viewer is being pushed away from people and towards nature," says the description of the earliest painting; in another we read that Latimer "employs radiating brushstrokes which emanate from the model"; in yet another, "The composition pushes the eye of the viewer back and forth between the different groups in a sort of tennis match." And so it is with the story, in which the reader is constantly pushed away from one potential "plot" or "protagonist" or "central concept" in favor of another (or in favor of nothing, of an absence), in which the written equivalent of brushstrokes emanate from one area only to illuminate another.

The story's ironies reach probably their height in the one note not detailing a painting: the one on a video clip taken from a "documentary concerning contemporary artists" in which Latimer was featured. It is here that Latimer says "You have to paint what you see, not what you think you're supposed to see" as she sketches out a precise portrait of a long-dead young girl who is of course absent. And it is here that the notes give us, as a "discussion question" (at least one of which follows each of the notes):

Now that you see Latimer's manner of speaking and moving, are you surprised? Does she seem like the sort of person who would produce this sort of work?

Aside from being a parody of the kind of superficial discussion prompts common to the form Schneyer is mimicking, the questions are almost teasing the reader — who has of course not seen Latimer at all, as she is simultaneously long dead, in the future, and not real. She is actually absent to us as the dead girl is supposed to be to her.

As a whole the story raises and plays with (in the sense that play can also be serious) questions of its own appropriateness, indeed of the appropriateness of storytelling in general. In what sense can an absent person be "represented"? What does it mean that we are watching a "story" unfold? In the note on "The first of Latimer's paintings to draw critical attention" (and the one which is later criticized in another of her paintings), a Self-Portrait with Surrogates which portrays the "notorious child abuse and murder case" in which the aforementioned girl was the victim, we read that "None of the figures [the girl, her mother, and her father] displays any emotion; it is as if they are spectators at the event." Not only is this a reminder of our own spectatorship at an event — Latimer's life — which includes much pain, loss, and death, it also calls into question our reasons for spectating, and the involvement we feel in the event: what are these "emotions" we tell ourselves we feel when we say that a story is moving, or affecting, or sad or even happy?

The story ends, after a discussion of Latimer's final completed painting, with a last discussion question:

The title Comfort was suggested by Paula Tarso, executrix of Latimer's artistic estate; we do not know what Latimer herself planned to call it. Do you think the name fits?

Far more than simply raising once again the matter of Latimer's absence and unknowability, more even than raising again the questions about appropriateness that the story has been dealing with, this ending places the reader in the uncomfortable position of being implicitly given the authority — which the reader cannot actually possess — to determine appropriateness (i.e., by asking us if we think the name fits, the question implies that we are in a position to make such a judgment), while simultaneously having that authority relegated to the realm of mere opinion, in which everything is valid to the point that nothing is. Is this assignment of meaning to an absent woman's life and work appropriate? You decide!

Sturgeonblogging: Robert Reed's "Mystic Falls"

Though I've known his name for a while, it's only recently that my idiosyncratic and, to be honest, desultory explorations of contemporary (read: 1980 and after) sf have brought me to read a little bit of Robert Reed. When I subscribed for a year to Fantasy and Science Fiction, I was impressed with his novella "Katabasis" in the November/December 2012 issue — one of the about one-every-three-issues great stories that otherwise garbage magazine publishes, that make one almost regret letting one's subscription lapse. More recently, my significantly more pleasing subscription to Asimov's brought the remarkable alternate history "The Principles" in the April/May 2014 issue. Both stories are so much more concerned with allowing themselves, and the thoughts they think, to happen — and with examining what it means for themselves to be happening — than with PLOT! HOOK! PLOT! that it's hard to believe the contemporary sf field produced them. I've been very interested to read more of him.

So I came to "Mystic Falls" prepped to admire. As such it was a bit distressing to find that it is one of the two Sturgeon-shortlisted stories (the other being Sarah Pinsker's) that begins with one of those hooky one- (or in this case two-)sentence opening paragraphs that I spend so much time on twitter (and, occasionally, here) complaining about.

       There might be better known faces. And maybe you can find a voice that rides closer to everyone's collective soul.
       Or maybe there aren't, and maybe you can't.

Then another paragraph break, followed by more concrete narration. Again. Leaving aside the unpleasant associations called up by the last two words of the first paragraph, I see no reason for a story to begin this way other than accommodation to the needs of commerce. Though I may need to write one eventually, now is not the time for a full anti-short-paragraphs manifesto. For now I'll just say that my objection to this behavior is moderately lessened in this particular case by the insistence on such staccato paragraphing throughout — this is clearly a conscious choice, rather than an empty kowtowing to That's Just What You Do — though still I don't particularly see why Reed would want to hit the enter key so often, to such flatly faux-dramatic effect. Were I not so overexposed to these unbearable Hook The Reader As Soon As Possible moves, perhaps I wouldn't object so strongly, but I am, and I do.

Fortunately, there are things going on here other than an itchy paragraph finger; and though I cannot admire "Mystic Falls" as strongly as I did "Katabasis" and "The Principles", it does confirm for me that Reed is a writer worth exploring.

The story concerns what appears to be a woman — a woman no one remembers meeting until, later, they upload and re-play a day's memories and find that she passed nearby, or that her voice come to them in an advertisement, or that — with almost everyone, at some point — she actually said "Hello" and made brief conversation. Most people, perhaps influenced towards belief by some unknown aspect of her nature, accept this as merely a lapse in their real-time memory, because the uploaded memory certainly is not lying!, and grow fond of her as, perhaps, some local actress poised at the brink of global stardom. Some people, though — a few "experts who live for this kind of puzzle, and a lot more is at stake here than simple curiosity" — realize that she, who first started appearing only about seven weeks ago, and whom they only noticed still more recently — is, in the terms used to describe her in three successive, verbless, single-sentence paragraphs, a "cypher", a "monster", "The most elaborate computer virus ever." It is these experts (all except the narrator anonymous, usually speaking and behaving in unison), and their efforts to figure out what, and why, this woman is, that the story follows.

She exists only in memory — she is never now, she is always then — and even then only in computerized, stored memory; she only exists when those memories are actively reviewed. This requires, and/or allows, Reed to tell a story that does very peculiar things with both memory and time. The meat of the story's "action" revolves around the narrator's attempt, as planned with those other experts, to go back to the point in his uploaded memory that contains his own supposed meeting with her, in order to behave differently "this time", asking her questions in the hopes of discovering her nature. What a strange endeavor this is!

My uploaded memory claims that I stopped on this ground, here. I do that again, saying, "Hello," while the others chatter away, ignoring both of us.

Not "I stopped," not "I remember stopping," but "my uploaded memory claims that I stopped." The combination of the "ordinary" unreliability of subjective memory, the objectivity of computer records, and, overlaid on both, the certainty that the "objective" is lying is fascinating beyond the basic Philosophy 101 Cartesian level it may seem at first (and at last, on which more later) to be operating on; the impossibility of grasping anything solid despite the overwhelming sense that there is clearly something there to be grasped reminds me of the feeling one gets on trying unsuccessfully to remember a dream one recalled clearly just a moment ago; it also puts me in mind of my own model of sf's exploration of the limits of the explicable and of what happens to forms of explication when they encounter the inexplicable. And what on earth does it mean to say "I do that again" about an experience lived, remembered, misremembered (or dis-remembered?), and then relived? The narrator (as distinct from the story) both is and is not interested in such questions; if anything, he seems to be avoiding them, as though by not asking them their answers will go away.

But the telling in and of itself unavoidably poses the questions; the only way to evade them entirely would be to fall silent, and it seems the narrator cannot do this. Even at his most straightforwardly narrative moments, even as he tries to put the story into a simple anecdotal form, the very tenses and moods of the verbs betray his efforts — as here, after he makes contact with the woman (in the same way that his uploaded memory claims he "really" did) and in talking they discover (or rediscover, or claim) that they both take their dogs to the same vet, and both grew up in the same town:

We share a little laugh. Again, the coincidences should be enormous, but they barely registered, at least after the first time. All this distance from our mutual home, and yet nothing more will be said about our overlapping lives.

Present tense, conditional, past tense, a very ambiguous "after the first time," future tense: all describing the same event, all as accurate as they are inaccurate — and all necessary if the event is to be spoken of at all. Again I am put in mind of the strange things that happen to time when trying to recall a dream; the dream occurred at a fixed point in the past, during which things progressed, but in another sense it does not happen at all until it is remembered (if it is remembered) on waking, or later — and there is a further sense in which a dream sometimes can insinuate itself into memory, so that something dreamed just a moment ago seems to take its place in one's personal chronology days or weeks ago, retroactively coloring other past events, this other time dissolving, perhaps not fully, once the dream is consciously remembered. We do not quite have the language to speak easily of this, just as the narrator does not have the language to speak of what happened, is happening, to him.

But these events compel speech nonetheless. Who is this narrator who needs so to speak? We learn his name, Hector Borland, which seems almost too specific for someone who remains so fuzzy (the same is true of the "cypher" herself, who introduces herself with the peculiar name "Darles Jean" — both names make me feel like they're meant to suggest something, but nothing attaches to them, at least for me). In the room of faceless experts, "fifty minds, most of whom are superior to mine," he nevertheless "manage[s] to offer what none of the wizards ever considered" — namely, the approach of simply asking the woman who and what she is. He asks, in narration, if he is smarter than his colleagues, and answers himself, "Rarely." He asks if he has "some rare insight" into the situation, and answers himself, "Never." On the other hand, he says — without elaborating on it — that "There are also some happenstance reasons why my life meshes nicely with 'hers.'" He has a "little bit of fame," which, he tells us, "stems from an ability for posing respectable, unanswerable questions". In a very peculiar passage which reminds me of some of sf's coldly comic Continental pessimists — Houellebecq, maybe, or Lem — he tells us that

in life, both as a professional and as a family man, my technique is to juggle assessments and options that nobody else wants to touch. By avoiding the consensus, much of the universe is revealed to me. My children, for example. Most fathers are quite sure that their offspring are talented, and their daughters are lovely while their sons will win lovely wives in due time. But my offspring are unexceptional. In their late teens, they have done nothing memorable and certainly nothing special, and because I married and unsentimental woman with the same attitudes, our children have been conditioned to accept their lack of credible talent. Which makes them work harder than everyone else, accepting their little victories as a credit to luck as much as their own worthiness.

He describes these children of his as "exceptionally ordinary," and with those words he might as well be talking about himself, or at least the version of himself he allows us to see. Either there is something obvious in all this information that I in my cluelessness am not getting, or it is yet another dimension of the "ungraspable something" in this story. The narrator is a professional who has a seat at emergency meetings of experts, but in what field is he a professional, in what is he expert? What "assessments and options" does he juggle? How is "much of the universe" revealed to him? (Stranger, how are his children an "example" of this?) Yes, it turns out, I am reminded of Lem, particularly the hero of The Chain of Chance — who is both a totally ordinary middle-aged frump who only qualifies to be the hero of his story because he is so unexceptional, and also a celebrity astronaut with remarkable training both physical and mental. Indeed, both men find themselves faced with "cyphers" instead of antagonists, and both are themselves nearly as devoid of identity as those cyphers.

But while the impulse that moves Lem's hero to tell his story is not ultimately much different from that which causes one arm of a bureaucracy to generate a report for another, our Hector Borland's reasons for speaking are much more nebulous. He often addresses the reader directly (as in the above-quoted opening lines), but he just as often seems deliberately to reject the communicative. He writes very strangely, sometimes with peculiar sentence structure and word choice that seem at first a stilted way of saying something simple but turn out on closer inspection not quite to mean like one thinks they do:

I pause, and she comes up behind me, and for the first time what is as real as anything is what touches me from behind, the hand warm and a little stronger than I anticipated...

On my first reading, "for the first time what is as real as anything is what touches me from behind" immediately resolved itself into meaning, roughly, "she touched me from behind for the first time, and it felt as real as anything"; to the extent that story is communication, I think one has to believe that this is what these words communicate. But it is not what they mean! — or, rather, it is only one of the less likely possibilities of what the words could mean. Sometimes it is individual words that behave so strangely, as when he says that "if she has any real eyes, she notices the same spot" that he does. "Any"? And surely it is not whether or not she has "real eyes" that determines whether she is capable of noticing! Or take the moment, during the same incident I've taken both of these examples from, in which the narration switches from event to infodump:

The Mystic Falls wait around the next bend in the canyon. When I came to this ground for the first time, I paid surprisingly little attention to bird songs and tumbling water. In a world where every sight is uploaded and stored — where no seconds are thrown away — people have a natural tendency to walk in their own fog, knowing that everything missed will be found later, and if necessary, replayed without end.

The words "surprisingly" and "necessary" here are nearly impossible to understand. Why surprising, and to whom? Immediately after telling us that his inattention is surprising, he explains why it is not, and presumably would not be to any reader inhabiting the same world as he. And necessary — again, why, and to whom? Desirable, certainly, perhaps even compulsive, but what could make the endless replaying of a specific memory "necessary"? Even when he is (or seems to be) trying to explain things simply, Borland seems inescapably tied to incomprehensibility.

In his 1959 essay on "The Proper Use of Science Fiction" (many thanks to the estimable Maureen K. Speller, who made it possible for me to read this essay), Maurice Blanchot asks why sf (by which he means almost exclusively the American magazine sf of the 30s to the 50s) is so riddled with anacronism — why, though "the human world is conjured up as it will be in a hundred thousand years time", "man, leaving aside the usual changes in scenery, continues to live in much the same way in a universe that is depressingly static." He does not rule out "paucity of talent" or "lack of patience" as explanations, but he does offer another: that despite pretence to the contrary,

no one is interested in the existence of the completely different time of a completely different world. There should not be too much novelty. News from the year ten thousand will get through to us only to the extent that it is translated back into our own ways of life. Works of science fiction often overdo this process of re-translation.

"In general," he adds, "the genre tends to neglect the problem of the mediator." There is plenty of room for quibbling, and one could point, even at the relatively early date at which Blanchot was writing, to exceptions — but I think the point stands: he is observing real problems, ones which are still relevant to the field today (in some ways I might even say more relevant now than then). In those few of his works that I've read, Reed is consistently aware of these problems, and "Mystic Falls" is no exception. It is almost wholly about, not only the problem of the mediator as a person, but also the problem of mediation as a phenomenon. It is as if, to take Blanchot literally for a moment, the story were stuck somewhere mid-translation: almost but not quite recognizable, almost but not quite comprehensible; and by positioning itself thus, it makes the consideration of these problems inescapable.

It is in this spirit, too, that I think the story's worldbuilding needs to be read. The prevailing view would hold that works of sf are rewarding to the extent that the worlds they evoke are complex, and clear in their complexity. While there is something to this view, on its own it smacks a bit too much of the "overdone re-translation" Blanchot identifies: that is to say, a genuinely other world, whether removed from our own in time or in space or both, could not be made clear in the language we possess. And so it is that even as he gives us fairly concrete details — early on we know that there are still taxis, that phones are something you can argue with, that there is a "smart power grid" — Borland's world always remains unilluminated. Despite the fact that much of the story is spent hiking out in the open and in the sun, the story feels enclosed, dark, a tiny capsule moving through a larger something that, once more, can never quite be grasped. The unknowability extends so far that even when things get a more than a little fantastical toward the end:

The Falls were exactly as I remembered them: A ten thousand foot ribbon of icy water and mist, pterosaurs chasing condors through the haze, and dragons chasing both as they wish. The wilderness stretched beyond for a full continent, and behind me stood fifty billion people who wouldn't care if I were to leap into the canyon below.

...it's difficult to be certain that something has changed, that something is amiss here.

Unfortunately shortly after this, at the very end of the story, a kind of knowing certainty enters into the story. Though it is phrased as a question, Borland's "What if some of us, maybe the majority of us, were cyphers too — fictions set here to fool the few of us who were real and sorry about it?" collapses the story into a one-sentence proposition, a sort of Descartes-by-way-of-The-Matrix red pill/blue pill choice. This constriction is reinforced by the final sentence, whose otherwise potentially interesting celebration of reality even in the face of solipsism reads with such assurance that it could almost have started with "The moral of the story is...". In a post in praise of Clifford D. Simak's story "The Answers", I wrote — if I may be forgiven for blockquoting myself — that its ending too

resolves the story's ambiguities into a mere proposition, something that at last asks the reader simply to agree or disagree — complex, hesitant, and ambivalent as such agreement or disagreement may in any case be (as it is in mine). But if the story falters here at the end, succumbs at last to the tempting patness it had heretofore resisted, this in no way invalidates what came before — rather it means that the inevitable failure of the crucial but ultimately impossible endeavor Simak has set for himself is in this specific case a bit more spectacular than we might wish.

I find that I cannot say the same about "Mystic Falls." The difference, I think, is that while Simak's story has, in its every moment, a life and unfolding all its own — and thus a poor ending is only one of the flaws inevitable in any great work — Reed's story seems in retrospect entirely oriented around its ending. Everything that happens here happens so that Reed can make the proposition he has caused Borland to close with.

There is much more that could be discussed here. Some things that come to mind that I have not really addressed include, on the plus side, the fascinating nature of the cypher's being and her eventual death, and the story's kind of sideways championing of what I might call "enough-ness" (as in, "this is not everything but it is enough for me in life"); and on the minus side, the distressing pattern I've noticed in Reed of, if not quite active chauvinism, then certainly that kind of too-comfortable straight-dudeliness that in practice accedes all too readily to the broader needs of patriarchy. But no review can ever be comprehensive, and I have to stop somewhere, so I think I'll stop here: with the reiteration of my feeling that this story is a good attempt at an intriguing notion by an interesting writer, somewhat badly misfired; but misfire or no, one would be better served reading it than the vast bulk of short sf being published today.

Sturgeonblogging: Sarah Pinsker's "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind"

This is a story so perfectly executed according to its own ambitions that it is impossible to critique it in its own terms. Indeed, though a cultural critic — even myself, since I'm occasionally inclined in that direction (though not at the moment) — might be able to find much to talk about in it (representations of aging, of gender, of complicity with oppressive systems), aside from that it is basically impossible to say anything at all about it, as literature, in its own terms. All that can be done is to speak in favor of or against those terms.

As a matter of principle, I should speak against them. Though it is not, like the last one was, formula and nothing other than formula, it is nevertheless the kind of story I find largely unacceptable, the kind of story most everyone, it seems, wants to read and write over and over. But I find I don't really have the heart to do it. For one thing, I've done it a billion times already.

But people insist upon writing stories this way, and other people seem to find great power in it. Why?

Her novel truly is written in living color and surround-sound; her efforts in these directions are sometimes astounding. But it is in these efforts, indeed in their notable success, that my problems with the novel lie.

What, for example, is all this "narrative" doing to us? What has it done?

If Konstantinou has his way...then sf, far from being a salutary "alternative" to realism, merely compounds — indeed "complements", in the sense of making complete and total — the problem of realism.

...and so on. For another thing, I can't really find it in myself to get worked up over this story. I didn't hate reading it; I even gave in at times to its way of being and allowed myself to "enjoy" it (using that word in the specific sense in which we speak of "enjoying" art that is not about enjoyable things). Were that way of being not hegemonic, I might even be able to say yes, this is a good story, recommend it, and leave it at that. As it is I can't do that (or, to the extent that this is "a good story" — which it certainly is — I don't think I can endorse "story" itself), but neither can I particularly work up the venom to denounce it.

So what, then? I considered writing about its relationship to sf, which is quite deliberately tenuous; there are interesting things to be said about sf stories that position themselves at such a distance from the sfnal without giving up their sf nature. Things are very different here than they were in the Val Nolan story, whose only claim to "being" sf is that no other kind of publication would have been foolish enough to be interested in it; instead, what Pinsker seems to be after here — and in itself this is I think very promising ground to explore — is what becomes of the utterly quotidian and mundane in a world that elsewhere has grown, or threatens to grow, sfnal. Fascinating things could no doubt be said about this endeavor in itself (as it is best seen on a re-read) as well as the strange things that go on from the reader's point of view when we first read a story that is ultimately so quotidian primed, by its position in an sf magazine, to look for signs of sf's subjunctivity — signs which are almost wholly absent. But, perhaps it's just the mood I'm in, perhaps it's Sturgeonblogging exhaustion setting in, perhaps it's an exhaustion brought on by this story in particular* — whatever it is, I find myself feeling that what I just said is enough to say about that, at least for now. I just don't have any need right now to explore those thoughts. If you want to, have at it.

*As I glanced over the first page of my print-out of the story, all the verbs in the past perfect — "She had always been calm in the family's minor medical crises"; "It had snowed the day they met" — made me sigh, get very tired, and contemplate giving up. Such sweepingly, authoritatively assertive constructions tend either to make me instantly combative — "Oh she had been, had she?!?" — or to wear me out, and this time they promised to wear me out. That they did not, that the story was eminently readable, is a testament both to its achievement and to the reasons I find that achievement problematic.

That spot of potential interest notwithstanding, I think a story like this — and its multiple award recognitions, and the string of "beautifully told", "made me wish for more", "wonderful characters"-type comments it generated in its own comments section — just makes me feel that science fiction, as it exists today, is not for me. A field that can produce, and recognize, a work this fully realized, this supremely well-executed, clearly knows what it's doing — and what it's doing cannot include me. A field that can produce and recognize this work is not my field. I can understand that no one else will particularly care about this feeling as much as I do (after all no one else is me) (and anyway I'm probably just writing out of a fleeting moment of overdramatic direness and will feel moderately better if I go take a nice brisk walk or something) but for me it can feel on the level of a catastrophe. I am not for the most part nostalgic for the field's past, but at some point (let's call it "1980" for convenience) as we journeyed from that past to today's present, I went one way and sf went another. Science fiction has always been my home and my calling; but as my home and my calling, I fear it no longer exists — or maybe rather, it refused ever to come into being.

Sturgeonblogging: Val Nolan's "The Irish Astronaut"

I hate to be a "this isn't sf" scold, but I'm sorry, in every sense in which a work can be considered to "be" or "not be" sf, this story is not sf. Shifting boundaries, contested definitions, all that, but no. It has to do with space exploration, which makes it tenuously linked to sf socially, but still, no. "Aha," someone might say, "but in the real world there was never a space vessel named Aquarius that blew up, and probably no astronaut has had his ashes scattered in Ireland, ergo sf," to which I say that there never was a man named Swann the way Proust describes him, but that does not make À la recherche sf.

It is not be sf, but it is "genre", oh so very much so: it is genre lit fic.* That it was published in a nominally sf venue is due, as far as I can tell, first to the refusal of lit fic's generic spaces to publish stories with space in them, even if it's not really in them, even if not remotely sf, and second to sf's willingness to take on lit fic's abandoned stories (no doubt itself a result of sf's utterly obnoxious inferiority complex; the field still largely thinks it needs to prove itself "as good as" lit fic, which usually works out to mean "the same as").

*Nota bene that that's two links there.

Well, it is not, or at least it should not be, sf's responsibility to absorb lit fic's unwanted. It is not remotely my interest to slam airtight doors around the field, but it is important to me that sf be its own unique thing, and not give up that uniqueness in pursuit of a vast mediocrity it has convinced itself is greatness.

Generic, generic, generic. This story is formula through and through. It begins in medias res because that's what you do, then quickly comes a scene break and some filling in of backstory, because that's what you do, and so on and so on. And so it goes, and so it goes, on and on until finally the inevitable climactic scene of emotional breakthrough occurs, the reader feels a brief stab of emotion-like something exactly at the moment expected, and then, temporarily satiated, returns to work, keeping capital flowing yet another day, after which the reader requires another hit of epiphany and seeks it in another identical story.

It's narrated in, what's-it-called, style indirect libre or whatever?, limited omniscient third person?, who cares, it's the third person but we're given the point of view character's thoughts, or rather the kind of irresponsibly authoritative absolute statements that masquerade as thoughts in this kind of story. Because that's what you do. But the story wants to keep one specific aspect of Dale's (the POV character's) thoughts vague, because it helps to build up to the emotion that has to come at the end if there's something to be sort of revealed, and so the disembodied narrator ceases to be able to read Dale's mind whenever his thoughts come close to that one piece of information. Why? Because that's what you do.

Would someone, someone, please give a thought as to what writing this way is saying? Why is it behaving this way? It's not like we're supposed to think Dale is playing coy with himself. What, then? If these writers would give half a second's thought to form rather than formula, maybe they could actually do something that mattered rather than filling in endless half-assed melancholic Mad-Libs.

And it's all just so writerly. A group of men with, not antagonism exactly, but a lot unspoken between them go fishing together; they exchange leading comments; and then "Their lines hung heavy in the water. Nothing was biting." Oooh. Because the fishing, and the silence. Ooh. Someone slap an award on this baby.

Maybe I'm being cruel. Maybe I should point out that there are some seeds of a good story here. There's some nice questioning of the "need" always to expand in order to experience strangeness, and of the feeling that experiencing strangeness is the only way to experience life. Nice. There are some bits about how the notion that Man's Destiny Lies In The Stars comes out of one specific worldview, and that there are others. Nice. There are some bits about the confusing-to-outsiders arrangement of a small town and the lives of the people who live in it, that reminded me of James C. Scott. Nice. And there's some good stuff about the uneven deployment of high technology in the world. Nice. But even the best seeds can't grow in soil this formulaic, tended by a farmer who either refuses or is terrified to think about what he's doing. Hey, look at that metaphor, ooh.

And not only that, but all of these hints at the possibility of something semi-approaching thought just make it all the worse that, excuse me but Mr. Nolan, did you know that you wrote a story about a mass murderer, melancholically figuring out how to dispose of the remains of his dead mass murderer friend? "I flew combat in Iraq," Dale says, and that dead friend, he "flew combat" too. "That's what you do in a war," says Dale later on, though the "that" is entirely free of antecedent and the sentiment neatly elides what choices "you" have to make to be in a position for that to be "what you do." "I flew combat in Iraq," spoken by a member of the goddamn US Air Force, literally means "I murdered a lot of people." I no longer have any patience for the massive machinery of mystification surrounding this kind of thing. It might be typical for the stories we continue to consume to behave as though people like this are not deliberate, cold-blooded murderers, to act like there's some kind of ethical gray area in working real hard to get the privilege to incinerate human beings alive, but typical or not it is not acceptable.

Dale's friend lived a life that Counts (i.e., he lived above the poverty line in the imperial center) and died a death that Matters (blowed up not by an Iraqi resistance fighter insurgent, but by faulty re-entry; sacrificed photogenically to the March Of Progress), and so his life and death are fetishized. Will we get melancholic stories about the disposal of the remains of any of these assholes' victims? Of course not. Those lives, those deaths, just don't matter. It's what you do in a war. (It's especially egregious that this story seems to grasp the fact that Imperialism Is A Bad Thing when the victim is Ireland, but apparently doesn't understand that the same holds true elsewhere. Irish lives matter more than Iraqi lives, I guess.) Instead, let's give the murderer a hero's send-off, literally fucking salute, wipe the single tear out of our eyes, and be very proud of the depth of our emotions . . . until we need a refill — which, don't worry, we can always get.

Sturgeonblogging: Alan DeNiro's "The Wildfires of Antarctica"

In the contemporary science fiction field of my dreams, disliking this story would come to me very easily. Stories so aware of their own status — both as stories in general and as science fiction stories in particular — would be common, as would stories so willing to be sort of batty and borderline incoherent. As things stand, however, such stories are vanishingly rare, and as such the temptation simply to accept this one as it is and praise it for the ground it is uncommonly willing to occupy is strong; and it takes an effort to say, no, I can't get behind this.

One of Samuel R. Delany's most famous contributions to the study of sf is his identification of sentences* that perform what I (stealing from Jo Walton) call an incluing role, as being particularly sfnal. Sentences such as Heinlein's "The door dilated," Delany has argued, which would be immensely odd — or simply meaningless — in works outside of sf, take part in the stated or unstated "scientific discourse" set up by the sf work, which not only frees such otherwise meaningless sentences to mean but also is itself revealed by such sentences. In other words, because we know that Beyond This Horizon "is" science fiction, we are free, in the face of the sentence "The door dilated", to understand that in this work doors work differently in such a way that to describe their motion as "dilation" is meaningful; conversely, in order to come to this understanding we are forced to imagine not only what this difference is (some kind of mechanical iris apparatus) but what it implies about everything else in the world of the work: i.e., we know that this world possesses the technology (and the economy) to create doors that function this way and, for whatever reasons (which we already begin provisionally to sketch in), the desire or need to do so. In such a way, to return to my favored terminology, we are "clued in" to the socio-technological differences between the world as we know it and the world of the work without actually having been told about any of these differences. In this sense the sentence is a window into science fiction. Simultaneously, science fiction is a window into the sentence — because if we haven't already decided that the work is science fiction, we won't know how to read the sentence.

*Delany likes to speak in terms of "sentences". I find this both less productive and less interesting than he does, but for the moment I will follow his example for ease of discussion.

So goes Delany's argument. He is clearly a partisan of such sentences, as is, far more so, Walton. In this they differ from me: I think that both incluing and the poorly understood, much-maligned direct infodump are central to the sfnal experience, and that the character of any individual sf work is determined to a large extent by the structural variation it establishes between the two.* (Indeed almost everything I write here is to some degree founded upon an analysis, implicit or explicit, of such variation.) At any rate the Official Party Line — which was in considerable flux when Delany began his critical project — has by now come down so firmly on the side of incluing (which is, we're told, "sophisticated", "immersive", and "subtle") against infodumping ("clunky", "takes you out of the story") that anyone who values the latter is practically forced into polemic.**

*This is one of many reasons that I think it is important to consider Joanna Russ's critical work along with Delany's; her frequent focus on sf's "didacticism" nicely complements his focus on what sf leaves unstated.
**Even the term "infodump" itself is generally understood as a pejorative, though I like it enough to try to reclaim it as a neutral descriptor.

Why am I bringing all of this up? Well, put a mental bookmark in the bit where I said that these sentences are for Delany particularly sfnal, but for the moment I'm saying it as a prelude to one of the things that makes me want to ignore my reservations and praise DeNiro: which is that his deployment of incluing in this story is strong, playful, and, I want to say, ostentatious — an intriguing counter to the received notion that the technique's primary virtue is subtlety.

An early example might serve to show what I mean. The narrator, a wealthy art collector, is observing (by means of "surveillance bees") Roxy: Shark * Flower, a genetically engineered living artwork he commissioned (who is in many ways the protagonist of the story, to the extent that it has one), as she is displayed in an art museum along with two other works.

[O]ne time she presses her body against the glass of the panorama, close to Epoxy and Paint. As if trying to capture the false sunlight in her body. (She does not photosynthesize.)

The parenthetical does not serve to reveal what it literally says, that Roxy does not photosynthesize (for why would we assume that she did?). And while it does establish that she could have been designed to do so, doing so is not its primary purpose either (it is an inexperienced sf reader indeed who would be startled by such a possibility). Rather than these technological facts, what the parenthetical conveys is more a sociological mindset — it reveals that what reads to us automatically as, and is intended by its (fictional) writer to be, a would-be poetic extravagance ("As if trying..."), would read just as automatically to people in the world we're reading about as conveying a specific set of unexceptional but relevant factual information, were the point not clarified. (It also suggests that the narrator is one who likes to indulge in poetic extravagances, but worries terribly about being misunderstood when he does.)

My point is not that DeNiro is able to accomplish so much with such a small gesture (good job, gold star, etc.; if technical skill were Enough, I for one would not particularly feel the need to write criticism). Instead, I point this out to indicate that when DeNiro does so, he calls attention to it. There are any number of ways to convey all the same information he does here in the kind of subtle way that the average incluing fan would approve of ("As if she had been designed to photosynthesize," say, eliminating the parenthesis altogether), but DeNiro does not want us to miss the complex of mental processes that are called up by an arrangement of words on the page, and so he all but points at the words, saying, "these are words that make your brain do things, you should think about it." Throughout the story, from the two very funny and unsettling of courses early on* to the sudden, somewhat bewildering indirect information about the narrator's appearance in the final paragraphs**, DeNiro insists, for the most part admirably, on such pointing. Even in less specifically sfnal terms, the story refuses to behave in the usual manner of stories; see for example the one scene of real interaction between the narrator and another person (the artist who designed Roxy), which, simply, is not a "scene"; it comes and goes as quickly and uninvolvingly as it can, as though embarrassed by its own anecdotal nature.

*Reminding me of Delany's comment that one occasion of the word "obviously" in Russ's And Chaos Died "could occasion pages of explication de texte."
**Of a living "sculpture of me": "Its skin gleams white as mine gleams. Its eyes are opalesque like mine." — suggesting what we should have but I at least did not already guess, that he himself is heavily genetically modified.

All of this is especially appropriate given that the story concerns itself specifically with the nature of art, particularly the role of art under capitalism (and if we are living under "late capitalism," the story is set during extremely, extremely late capitalism*) and the attempt, perhaps by an artist, perhaps by several, perhaps by art itself, to break out of that role. The narrator is not so much an art collector as an art consumer (he calls his buying trips "going shopping," has a "favorite art-buying suit," says that "Art, above everything else, is a sign of one's station in life") and his attitude toward art in general is a parody both of the philistine and the refined, disinterested aesthete — both attitudes unique to modern, Western(ized) capitalism. And as "his" art misbehaves, bucking against these attitudes, so too must "his" story.

*The decadence of the setting is perhaps best exemplified by the narrator's aestheticization ("I actually think it's beautiful") of the titular wildfires, product of worst-case global warming. Or maybe by his casual recreational activity of "firing satellite armaments into the ruins of Buenos Aires."

But let's take a look at this misbehavior, shall we? The fictional artworks first. Roxy, deliberately designed by her maker to have violent tendencies ("Would you have asked Goya to make Saturn Devouring His Son a little less violent?" he asks), gruesomely kills several museum guards (as do other works, by other artists, displayed along with her). The rigged sculpture the narrator is sent at the end of the story, it is implied, is intended to kill his comatose wife. The art, apparently, has not been reminded to "punch up," and so the primary victims of its violence are — as has long been the case — proletarians and women. The case of the latter is particularly telling, as Roxy was literally made in the narrator's wife's image — the former's DNA is based on the latter's. Passive to the point of being coma-bound, her only role is to inspire, and then be destroyed by, art.* Sound familiar?

*In this connection it is also not irrelevant that Roxy is specifically a "she".

All this is not necessarily "bad", in terms of evaluating the story at hand — these are after all issues that must be addressed in any thorough examination of the modern role of art — but given the way the story conducts itself — its own specific ways of misbehaving — I find it all, well, misguided at best. It's not that I think the story "endorses" the view that art should rise up and kill working people and women,* or whatever nonsense; I don't think the story seeks to endorse anything at all, and certainly it parodies the artist (almost) as much as it does the art collector. But the whole thing just gives me the feeling that DeNiro is certain that he's better than what he's writing about — which is never a good look, and it gives the proceedings an air of glibness that I find frankly irresponsible, not to mention irritating. Despite all I've said about the story's welcome self-awareness as art exploring the self-awarness of art, this air of certainty and superiority makes it all fall flat; DeNiro seems to me at least to see himself as above all that, and as such everything seems to come just so easily. Lob a missile into Buenos Aires, make a crack about an art-buying suit, kill that woman, sink the Netherlands under water, shove a Pollock into the side of a whale: it's all the same, it's all easy, it doesn't matter, it's all down there somewhere. Even the eyecatching incluing I described earlier starts to feel less like a work of art insisting responsibly on its own artificiality and more almost a kind of juvenile bragging.

*Recommended reading: Joanna Russ's "A Boy and His Dog: The Final Solution".

I'm not saying the story should be deadly serious rather than comic. I'm saying that it needs to not be so glib. There is a difference. Reader, glibness is the enemy: it tricks us into not caring, into thinking everything is ultimately the same, ultimately dismissible; it tricks us into thinking that these are the attitudes of the mature adult, who has left caring about things behind with other youthful pursuits.

Glibness is the characteristic tone of much that is called "postmodern". Though this strain of postmodernism* has been eager to clasp sf to its heart, and much of sf has been eager to return the favor, I've always found that what is valuable in sf is very different, and that the alliance between the two has been catastrophic to precisely the extent that it has been successful in its own terms. Sf, even at its most naïve, even at its blandest, is about texture, variation, difference, disjuncture; and while postmodernism sells itself especially on this last, the glibness betrays it every time — by smoothing everything over into one textureless mass which the artist, only playing dead, surveys from his (or, less often, her) lofty perch, nods, and says "Yes, I can make use of this." The kind of analysis I find valuable in approaching sf (not to tootle my own flootle, but say for example what I was able to find by taking Alaya Dawn Johnson literally, or just in general the kind of examination of variation I mentioned earlier) finds itself with nothing to do.

*As with so many words the poor literary critic is forced to use, "postmodernism" means so many different things to so many different people as to be basically meaningless. Here when I use the term I am speaking specifically, if also vaguely, of "this strain" of it, though also as a general rule I think that to suggest we are "post" modernity is premature to say the least.

Delany, I said earlier, considers the kind of sentences DeNiro deploys so skillfully (as examined above) to be specifically sfnal. I don't think this is the case anymore. They have been absorbed by other modes — or maybe rather, contextless aspects of many modes have melded together into a slurry. Delany (and first publication in Asimov's) notwithstanding, this story's use of these formerly sfnal techniques reads to me not as sf so much as generic — indeed genre — postmodernism. Or, perhaps, I could consider the story either mediocre-to-bad at being sf (flat, thin, superficial, too preoccupied with metaphor), or good at being postmodern — but not both. And if I come down on the latter side, which I think I do, the question, which I'm pretty sure I know how I'd answer, becomes whether "good postmodernism" is actually a good thing.

Sturgeonblogging: Will McIntosh's "Over There"

This crap [PDF crap link] is so insultingly, uninterestingly bad that I almost want to refuse to write about it at all. But here I am, for, ahem, some reason.

So, some scientists perform a tiny little experiment in quantum teleportation, and for some reason (I don't know, because Roger Penrose mumbled something vaguely related once, who cares) this results in everyone on Earth (just humans? just here? who cares!) being aware of their sensations, thoughts, and actions in two different quantum realities or whatever simultaneously, in one of which, for sub-Langoliers reasons, there are big ribbons of light that everyone, en masse, spontaneously, without discussing it with each other, decides to call "dragons" for no good goddamn reason, that go around at random turning people into stone that still thinks, somehow, which everyone seems automatically to know is permanent and irreversible, and also it makes the other version of you go insane if you're a woman who is no longer important to the plot.

This, and (much more so) a whole lot of utterly meaningless running around, is accomplished through a formal device that I was actually mildly excited about before I started reading the damn thing, in which everything after the experiment and before [SPOILERS!!!!] one of the versions of the narrator dies (i.e., the bulk of the story) is told in two columns, sort-of-almost-simultaneously conveying what is going on for him in each reality. Before I started reading I kind of glanced ahead at this and noticed that the opening paragraphs of each column were identical but for one very minor adverb, and I was like, ooh. I was like, a science fiction story that resists being read straight through! I was like, maybe I'll get to quote Gabriel Josipovici on the struggle to make what are ultimately arbitrary writing decisions in the absence of a craft tradition! I was like, Derrida, something-something!

But the story doesn't support any of this — which would be fine, it doesn't have to support what I thought it might before I started reading it, but unfortunately another thing it doesn't support is anything else. This story is fundamentally not interested in anything at all. The unusual structure exists, I'm sure of it, because McIntosh DARED ASK: "Would this be kind of a neat trick maybe for some reason?" and lo he answered himself: "Meh, sure, who cares." Startlingly, the story answers all of the major questions it raises in ways that make "meh, sure, who cares" sound profound: McIntosh is deeply uninterested in exploring any of them. What would it feel like, what would it mean, to be simultaneously conscious of two distinct realities and two distinct versions of yourself? Who cares! What would it do to a person to know that he was responsible for a worldwide catastrophe? Who cares! What might it be like to be both dead and not dead? Who cares! In fact even on a more functional, procedural level I kept imagining McIntosh's whole writing process as a series of questions and non-answers:

Q. Wait, how do I deal with the passage of time in this structure I've chosen?
Non-A. Who cares, if you pretend things are simultaneous no one will notice. And just throw in section breaks wherever you get stuck, they don't have to make sense or line up with each other or anything.
Q. How do people behave during disasters?
Non-A. I don't know, but I bet they get selfish and violent for no reason unless they're the protagonist! And ooh, that's helpful, because I didn't know what to do after this section break.
Q. What motivates people to like, do shit and stuff?
Non-A. I don't know, women probably? Yeah, lemme put a woman in here. [He types: made... his... stomach... do... a... little... flip.] Hoo boy, now he'll wanna do things, that's for sure.
Q. Oh wait, aren't women sort of people too? What motivates them?
Non-A. God, I have no idea. Um, babies? Yeah, let's say babies, she's having a baby — his baby! Wow! Now there's a story! KEEP IT COMIN'!

I thought about quoting some individual sentences just to show how abysmal the prose is, too, but I have better things to do — literally everyone on earth has better things to do at all times, up to and including things your boss told you to do — than to examine this heap at that level of resolution. The writing is just really bad, OK? I mean, there's the link up there, look at it. It's embarrassing. Try the first five paragraphs if you want to experience successive jaw-droppings that will leave you, finally, jawless. Then skip ahead to somewhere in the middle and go down any page circling the occurrences of the word "guy," just for fun. Maybe their arrangement on the page is a secret code or something.

I'm trying at least to find it heartening that a magazine like Asimov's would publish, and an sf award jury would recognize, a story with some moderate formal oddity. But nope, I just can't.

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P.S. Who wrote the note at the top of the story explaining that it might not display right on some Newfangled Handheld Contraptions and that there's a PDF with the proper layout on the Asimov's website? What a mess. "The plot to 'Over There' can't be separated from its graphic layout on some digital readers." Huh? To me this first suggests that the plot only makes sense if the story looks the way it does on some digital readers — so sorry, print subscribers, we just sent you a load of nonsense! Or is it trying to say that "plot" is ordinarily something you "separate" from any given story's "graphic layout" as you read it, but that with this story, on some readers, you just can't properly effect this separation? What? I can think of several different ways to interpret that sentence, and none of them is "Some digital readers won't display this story right, so in addition to being terrible it might also be needlessly confusing unless you get the PDF", which is of course what it's supposed to mean.

Sturgeonblogging: Alaya Dawn Johnson's "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass"

No one reading this, I hope, wants or needs a white guy to explain why it's nice to see a science fiction story narrated by a middle-aged black woman and treating the lives of black women as being of the utmost importance. And no one, I hope, wants or needs a white guy to explain that there are certain resonances in a story about a pair of black women, sisters, struggling to wrest control of reproduction, of their bodies, from an incomprehensibly alien occupying force and, to a lesser extent, from religious and social pressures that originate from within the women's own community but tend to support the occupying force. So I'll do us all a favor and leave it at saying: these things are going on in "They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass" (PDF link), and they are very good; they form the context for everything else that I'll be talking about in this post, whether I say so explicitly or not.

The "glassmen," as the characters in the story call the occupying force, arrived (all over the world? certainly as far as the characters can see) several decades ago, when Libby, the narrator, was a little girl. Their origin, alien or human, is unknown, as are their motives:

No one knows what they really look like. They only interact with us through their remote-controlled robots. Maybe they're made of glass themselves — they give us pregnancy kits, but won't bother with burn dressings. Dad says the glassmen are alien scientists studying our behavior, like a human would smash an anthill to see how they scatter. Reverend Beale always points to the pipeline a hundred miles west of us. They're just men stealing our resources, he says, like the white man stole the Africans', though even he can't say what those resources might be. It's a pipeline from nowhere, to nothing, as far as any of us know.

"Who was to say what the glassmen were doing?" Libby asks herself at one point, and answers: "Killing us, that's all we knew." Later, "No one knows why the glassmen bomb us. No one really knows the reason for the whole damn mess, their reapers and their drones and their arcane rules you're shot for not following."

Those arcane rules, though we don't hear many of them, are the key to the anxious, sort of Kafkaesque (though not Kafka-like) feeling that the story sets up. For the glassmen aren't only an incomprehensible destructive force; aside from their cluster bombs (the "seeds of glass" of the title), the primary way in which occupier interacts with occupied is much in the manner of representatives of a managing bureaucracy. Libby and her pregnant sister Tris, taken prisoner by a glassman on their way to a rumored abortion doctor (abortion being emphatically forbidden by the glassmen, who prefer that pregnant women go to glassmen-operated hospitals from which neither women nor babies return), look for words to describe him and come up with "eager" and "young," and indeed he reminds one of nothing so much as an eager young lawyer or businessman, excited to join the firm, totally committed to its ideology and goals. Many of his sentences end in exclamation points, and even many of those that don't seem to imply them. "Good news," he says to his captives at one point. "I have been authorized to escort you both to a safe hospital facility." Though it is clear that he would not allow the sisters to escape from his custody, he does not treat them as prisoners — "I think our glassman is under the impression he's doing us a favor," as Libby puts it. This attitude of bureaucratic "helpfulness" leads to some bizarre exchanges:

       "It is my job to assess mission parameter achievables. Would you mind if I asked you questions?" ...
       We spend the next few hours subjected to a tireless onslaught of questions. Things like, "How would you rate our society-building efforts in the Tidewater Region?" and "What issue would you most like to see addressed in the upcoming Societal Health Meeting?" and "Are you mostly satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estuary?"
       "The fish are toxic," I say to this last question. My first honest answer. It seems to startle him. At least that's how I interpret the way he clicks his front two legs together. ...
       "Well," says the glassman. "That is potentially true. We have been monitoring the unusually high levels of radiation and heavy metal toxicity. But you can rest assured that we are addressing the problem and its potential harmful side-effects on Beneficial Societal Development."
       "Like dying of mercury poisoning?" ...
       "I do not recommend it for the pregnant one! I have been serving you both nutritious foods well within the regulatory limits."

Though the bureaucratisms elicit, from time to time, a sort of rueful smile of recognition, they don't strike me here as playing the same kind of primarily comic function that they seek to play in the work of, say, a George Saunders. They form a part of the terrifyingly uncontrollable fabric of the characters' lives, as unpredictable as the cluster bombs, and as potentially deadly. The stakes are real, and they are high — and the story makes it difficult to laugh at that.

None of this so far is unprecedented; indeed much of it is well-explored territory. But Johnson plays it very well, for the most part, and at any rate the point, despite all the talk of "exhaustion" and "revitalizing genre tropes" and so forth that is always abroad in the field, is not to do something "new" for the sake of novelty, but to allow something that needs to, happen. For me, the "They Shall Salt the Earth" experience centers around the feeling I feel as the story moves to its conclusion, in many ways similar to the sort of rising awe that comes with imminent revelation in many a good sf story, but ultimately very different — because here, one knows all the while that one is feeling it that it is inappropriate, and one senses from very early on that there can be little in the way of revelation here.

The feeling I'm trying to describe is tied up in the glassmen's utter mysteriousness; their presence, in the world of the story and in the story itself as fiction, poses a question that both cries out for an answer and denies the possibility of answers. Central to this is the "pipeline from nowhere, to nothing," previously described, which Libby and Tris see close up during their captivity.

The pipeline is a perfect clear tube about sixteen feet high. It looks empty to me, a giant hollow tube that distorts the landscape on the other side like warped glass. It doesn't run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map. Maybe this is the reason the glassmen are here. I wonder what could be so valuable in that hollow tube that Tris has to give birth in a cage, that little Georgia has to die, that a cluster bomb has to destroy half our wheat crop. What's so valuable that looks like nothing at all?

Looked at one way, a pipeline seeming to carry nothing from nowhere to nowhere could be seen merely as a metaphor for whatever the reader has decided the story Is About: rampant environmental destruction, racism, misogyny, the interface of any of these with the capitalism they power and are powered by, what have you — any of these could be the metaphorical answer to Libby's question here. And to be sure these notions do resonate powerfully. But, decades of clueless academic intervention notwithstanding, neither metaphor nor allegory on their own are fruitful ways to read (or to write) science fiction. However allusive, elliptical, or "poetic" — not to mention political! — it may choose to be at any given moment, sf plants its flag firmly in the literal, where lie its most basic strengths and weaknesses alike. And so while we can find whatever metaphors we like, and be affected by them as powerfully as the story's abilities and our own allow, we cannot stop there — we must confront the pipeline's literal presence in the story — which confrontation must necessarily take place in the context of all of these metaphors and social and political significances.

So what is the pipeline? In many ways it is what the SF Encyclopedia calls a Big Dumb Object,* but the meanings of the first two words in that term are different here than when they are applied to the "classic" BDOs — and this difference defines to a large extent the ways in which "They Shall Salt the Earth" is an experience unique to itself. Rather than having, as Larry Niven's Ringworld famously does, a surface area greater than all of the planets of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire combined, it merely (merely!) "doesn't run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map." And unlike, say, Arthur C. Clarke's Rama, the pipeline's "dumbness" consists not in disinterested — and passive — silence but in active obfuscation.

*I'm not linking to the online entry because they have alas pulled back from the term's use, preferring the much less descriptive, and more blandly respectable, "macrostructure". In the entry in my 1995 print edition, Peter Nicholls credits Roz Kaveney as the possible originator of the term. I'm choosing, incidentally, to interpret the word "dumb" as meaning "mute" rather than "stupid", as this is to me both the more relevant and the more interesting option.

Only those who have the power to define what knowledge is — and this is a structural power, based on countless violences — can simply assume that the search for knowledge will always be possible, and can always be fulfilled. When the world you are made to live in has never been perfectly explicable in your terms, at your leisure, when you have no expectation that things exist in order for you to grasp them (literally and figuratively), "no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map" is big enough to be Big — and what masquerades as helpfulness is worse than silence, worse than disinterestedness.

So. When this Big Enough Worse Than Dumb Object, practically by structural dint of its presence in the story alone, creates that aforementioned feeling of rising awe — the prelude to sensawunda, if you will — it creates with it a contradiction at the heart of this story, which seems almost like it should have no room for awe. It is disconcerting to feel that some wondrous revelation is imminent when one knows that it is not, or that if it is, it will be only a sign of the writer's betrayal of her own vision — and there is no such betrayal here. The closest we come to an explanation of the pipeline is in the passage where another prisoner, taking advantage of a moment when the glassman is temporarily deactivated (that is, the person controlling it, wherever he is, seems to be occupied elsewhere), proposes the theory that it is a wormhole.

       "A passage through space, that's what I heard."
       "That is incorrect!"
       The three of us snap our heads around, startled to see the glassman so close. His eyes whirr with excitement. "The Designated Area Project is not what you refer to as a wormhole, which are in fact impractical as transportation devices." ...
       "Then what is it?" she asks, so plainly that Simon's mouth opens, just a little.
       Our glassman stutters forward on his delicate metallic legs. "I am not authorized to tell you," he says, clipped.
       "Why not? It's the whole goddamned reason all your glassman reapers and drones and robots are swarming all over the place, isn't it? We don't even get to know what the hell it's all for?"
       "Societal redevelopment is one of our highest mission priorities," he says, a little desperately.

Any reader remotely similar to me is fascinated here. A wormhole? In a pipeline? Intriguing! Does the urgency with which the glassman denies it mean that it's true? Does the "what you refer to as" and the (accidentally?) dropped information that wormholes are "in fact impractical" imply that the glassmen are aliens? There are three pages left in the story — what might they contain? But at the same time, the reader knows that in this story there is no guarantee that questions like this can be answered. In this story there is no privileged right to know everything — attempts towards knowledge can simply be cut off at a whim, or by an anonymous official's sudden "I am not authorized to tell you" followed by some bureaucratic platitude as firm as it is empty. At any rate, surely those last three pages will have to be more concerned with simple survival than anything else (even the conversation about the wormhole is as much a cover for an escape attempt as it is a search for information). And indeed the last three pages are filled with survival. And so the reader is left trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, to try to grasp the immense in a world so restricted as to have no room for it.

In case anyone (still) reading this post (hello!) is maybe unfamiliar with the positive use of words like "contradiction", "irreconcilable" and "disconcerting", let me say straight out: this has all been praise. Where the story is irreconcilable, it lives.

Like "The Weight of the Sunrise," "They Shall Salt the Earth" is shortlisted not just for the Sturgeon but for the Nebula as well. That this double honor should be shared by two stories with such, shall we say, different merits led to me to wonder — why? And I suspect that it has much to do with those elements of this story that I do not think deserve praise, those aspects of it that threaten to overcome what is important about it. For the one thing that both stories (and "Bloom", for that matter) have in common is that they are very writerly — by which I mean, they very much desire to be "beautifully written". But is such a desire appropriate?

There is a thing people do over and over again, that other people praise over and over again, where stories of deep rupture are told as though there were no rupture, as though the stories we've been telling ourselves all along can just continue on unaffected no matter what's going on. As though skill and competence and mastery were not only of the utmost importance and appropriateness now (a doubtful proposition) but surely would remain so, unchanged, on the other side of a rupture. As though a story so much concerned with the lack of control should be tightly controlled. I've talked about this before, and while this story is not nearly so compromised by these problems as the one I discussed there (which also was going for a very different kind of mastery), it is compromised.

Or at least I think it is. But people insist upon writing stories this way, and other people seem to find great power in it. Why? What is the power of, for example, sentences like these, taken from two different parts of the story?

I lean back in the boat, the canvas of our food sack rough and comforting on my slick skin, like Mom's gloves when she first taught me to plant seeds.

I have lots of time to wonder about those marks; hour after slow hour with a rattling truck bruising my tailbone and regrets settling into my joints like dried tears.

What is the power of sentences such as these — sentences that seem to me so woefully inadequate to their task — that people return to them, as readers and writers, over and over again?* As a reader, I feel like I'm being asked — and not only, or even primarily, by Johnson — to nod approvingly and say, "Oh, good job, lovely." But what room is there in this story for "good job"? What room is there for "lovely"?

*Please don't come at me with an explanation of the similes. Though the one in the second sentence seems pretty much like a misfire to me, my problem does not lie in a failure to grasp what these sentences seek to mean.

On the second page of the story, we read: "We have a nice smile, Tris and I." Fine. Given the unhappy circumstances of the story, and the childhood reminiscences that surround this sentence, there's a certain melancholy weight to the observation. Not a big deal of a sentence, I have no complaints, no reason to particularly notice it either way. The story goes on, the experience is had, and then it ends with this final, short paragraph:

We have the same smile, my sister and I. It's a nice smile, even when it's scared and a little sad.

And....OK? Again, I understand the meaning this is seeking to convey. But to convey it this way? To me it just seems, once more, inappropriate: a pat conclusion, attaching neatly to something at the beginning of the story, a nice bow to complete the package — in a story that, admirably, has no conclusions to offer, refuses to be neat, and, though it contains beauty, does not deal in prettiness. Once or twice, the story seems to acknowledge the problems with trying to conduct itself this way, as when Libby tells us early on that "Wishful thinking is a powerful curse, almost as bad as storytelling." This reminds me a bit of Lorrie Moore's one good story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" (which I have touched on in the past), in the way that it seems Libby is saying: I know that what I'm doing is unacceptable, but it's all I know how to do. But here, these one or two isolated instances have nothing to attach to, and so they fall flat — and the problem remains. As with Bossert's "Bloom", the good outweighs the bad, and I am pleased that this story has received some well-deserved recognition. But I confess that I am bemused, and troubled, by the persistence of this kind of problem, even in cases such as these where it can be, mostly, overlooked.